A painting is the imagination that draws from reality, not plainly real, nor plainly imaginative.

Ye Yongqing - people call him “Chief Ye”, a strategic giant in the Chinese art field.  After being inspired by the American photorealist Chuck Close twelve years ago, he overthrew the traditional art thinking. Ye takes “bird” as the unique trademark, reverses classic Chinese logic and humorizes “bird” into the element of joke and scoff. He well elaborates the spirit of “playing art”, journeys to the world with a pipe of ink and a tiny “eyebrow pen”. Walking freely across scholar’s sentiment and humorous life, he gains a title which might be weird, but certainly suitable for him “Birdman”.

Ye Yongqing represents a landmark of another beginning of Chinese Contemporary art, which gains him an equal fame with Zhang Xiao Gang and other Chinese F4. He chooses “slow scribble” as a reverse way of thinking; he draws magnified and distorted bird in detailed however abstract lines. “Scribble usually gives an impression of fast and simple. But if I sketch something childish in a mature way and with slow process, people might miss-recognize it as a child’s drawing at first, then suddenly discovering the meaning in it. This is an interesting process that I am like a trap setter, making a joke to visitors just for a harmless fun.” Ye Yongqing loves this contrast of tradition and ridiculousness. In recent years, his subjects extend from birds to humanity and living environment. “Sometimes I wonder, am I the one playing on birds? Or it is birds playing on me?” says Ye.

In 1986, Ye Yongqing and a group of friends founded the "Southwest Arts Group," bringing about his direct participation in the "New Wave Arts" movement. To this day, he still fondly remembers that surging period. At the time, they were full of sincere ardor for humanist ideals. Yongqing avoided the scar art and the indigenous social realism of the previous generation, and he even seemed to have bypassed the path of "political pop" that was then gaining such attention worldwide with the flag of "to be integrated is to be creative" raised high. Instead, through his semasiology of pictorial idioms, he has ingeniously stridden into a new age of creativity, causing him to embrace conceptual art much earlier than other artists of his generation. The post-1997 Ye Yongqing has been ceaselessly expanding his spheres of activity, and at the same time taking up many different roles that have him flying all over the world, “I often see my life as like that of a migratory bird moving among several different cities, fragmented and with no fixed abode. I have this fantasy: I wave my hand and all these fragmentary images and ordinary objects that I have woven into and piled onto silk fill the ground with feathers that float away, like they had never even existed.”

His creation is as an extension of his thinking and as the evidence of the tumult of his thoughts and emotions. It seems to be memories of the past but even more resembles to the future that draws from reality. However, a wanderer’s mind is always flying and would never settle down. Time and location cannot admit him to put his eagerness in art into action from time to time. Yet, Ye transfers his pain into painting with a tiny eyebrow pen. It is a transcendent status after obstacles and struggles that break through the boundary, which enables him to enter the status of painting wherever he is. Returning to art, without any hinders, to the simplest but absolute ego and space.

Dali Script is Ye’s artistic creation in Yunnan this summer, the extraordinary scenery of Xishuangbanna is his spiritual home town. Just as a migratory bird, he set his foot between farmland and forest and discovered the traditional paper made in Lijiang which Naxi tribe uses to copy the “Dongba script”. Attracted by its texture of simplicity and elegance, his inspiration seems exceptionally tender and sentimental, fragile but full of complexity. Through his artistic creation, memories surge back to existence and to the reality. In his scribble journal, one can see an intellectual’s poetic and lyrical romance. It is an attitude of altitude that Ye Yongqing holds to the world.

Reception:  March 5th , 2011 (Saturday) 3:00~5:00PM